CGD

The Lexová & Smetana design studio was nominated in the Designer of the Year category for its exceptionally original design of the Hide and Seek collection of seating furniture, introduced to the public at the autumn Designblok in the Gabriel Loci monastery. It is worth mentioning that the collection made an impression unparalleled in the Czech context: it felt like a gust of playful, undiluted creativity reflecting a pleasantly emotional interpretation of functional forms. Designers say that the Polstrin brand management gave them absolute freedom in the creation of the series, which includes a sofa, an armchair and a lounge chair. Naturally, this show of extreme trust from the manufacturer was not coincidental but was based on a previous successful collaboration, the Infinite modular seating collection (2020), which won an award at the highly regarded international design competition BigSEE. The Hide and Seek collection heads in a slightly different, more intimate direction. "As children, we used to build hideouts from cushions and blankets in the living room, creating our little world. When we were designing the new collection for Polstrin, we found ourselves in our own playful world, too. We folded and loosely shaped cushions together until we created the Hide and Seek collection," say designers Terezie Lexová and Štěpán Smetana. The elegant, clean and simple morphology of the series plays with a rectangular base, while the edges are replaced by a curved shape with a generous and pleasantly "soft" radius. This organically shaped detail also subtly lightens the optical heaviness of the overall proportions. The construction solution also allows a view under the sofa, which provides the piece with lightness, especially in open spaces. The stocky legs of the lounge chair certainly attract attention: their striking shape, while not strictly functional, is a beautifully rounded manifesto of opulent beauty and a testament to creative distance and courage.

David Kalista